Southern Bookman

John Donne's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" still calls to us

I've been contemplating John Donne's meditation "No Man Is an Island."

The prose poem, published 400 years ago as part of Donne's "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in My Sickness," tells us that we are part of humanity, and must care for each other.

Donne famously warns us "never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

The metaphysical poet and Anglican cleric wrote the meditations in December 1623 after recovering from a near fatal illness. The composition was published in January 1624, one of only seven works attributed to Donne published during his lifetime, according to Wikipedia.

"Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions" is divided into 23 parts, consisting of "the meditation," "the expostulation" and a prayer. Chronologically ordered, each chapter covers Donne's thoughts and reflections on a single day of his illness. "No Man Is An Island" is the 17th devotion.

Donne's message rings through the years. The soaring death toll in Gaza and Ukraine, alarming climate change news and threats to American democracy make his words even more urgent. 

Here is a modern version of the devotion:

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
:

 

 

 

 

 

Tricia Romano's "When the Freaks Came Out to Write" looks back at Village Voice's glory day

The positive reviews of Tricia Romano's oral history of the Village Voice takes me back to the days when the newspaper arrived each week to my student apartment in Baton Rouge.

With its incandescent writers, hip photographers and cartoonist Jules Feiffer, New York City's "underground" newspaper brought a jolt of adrenaline into my mundane routine of classes, reading, listening to music and working at a downtown women's shoestore.

Romano's "The Freaks Came Out to Write" tops my current list of books to read. A former writer at the recently revived online and print newspaper, Romano looks at the publication's volatile history, intense newsroom rivalries and journalistic triumphs.

Giving a hip contrast to The New York Times, the Village produced hard-hitting investigative stories and insightful arts, film and music criticism.

Romano chronicles the Voice's vital work, such as stopping Robert Moses from building a four-lane highway through the village, joining forces with Jane Jacobs, Grace Paley and protesting Village mothers. 

Norman Mailer, a Voice co-founder, wrote an early column, and the Voice produced in-depth reporting on the Stonewall rebellion, the AIDs epidemic and the city's economic decline.

Reporter Wayne Barrett wrote ground-breaking exposes of Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani. Film critic Andrew Sarris, jazz writer Nat Hentoff, art critic Gary Indiana, feminist essayist Jill Johnston and writer James Walcott enlightened me.

Once a gritty, inexpensive shelter for impoverished artists, writers and musicians, the Village is now too expensive for low-income residents. Thanks to gentrification, homes are worth millions.

With the online media industry crashing, and print newspapers dying, Romano's book looks back on an era when journalism mattered.

 

Tyler Perry halts $800 million expansion after viewing "shocking" AI video technology

The AI future arrives with shocking speed.

Film and TV executive Tyler Perry announced last week that he's halting an $800 million expansion of his Atlanta production complex because of Open AI's Sora video program.

"It's shocking to me," Perry said of Sora, which can produce up to a minute of realistic video from simple spoken prompts. The message "beautiful, snowy Tokyo city" resulted in vivid, believable street scenes of the Japanese metropolis.

Perry had planned to build 12 new sound stages at his production facility at the former Fort McPherson. He said Sora could do the work that now requires film crews and months of shooting.

Sora threatens the jobs of actors, editors, sound technicians, camera operators and transportation workers, Perry said, calling for the industry to take action to protect employment.

Last fall, writers and actors strikes led to settlements that covered identity duplication, script production and other AI threats. Sora represents a new challenge.

Perry said he could sit at his desk and create in minutes film sequences now done on sound stages.

AI is rapidly disrupting other industries, with regulatory efforts stalled. We'll soon be living in a virtual AI world.

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert still glow in Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night"

My mother loved Clark Gable. One of the saddest days of her life came when Gable died in 1960.

While she adored Gable's performance as Rhett Butler in "Gone With the Wind," the 1934 romantic comedy "It Happened One Night" was her favorite Gable movie.

Frank Capra's influential film starring Gable and Claudette Colbert appeared in February 1934, the depths of the Depression. The Guardian's Jesse Hassenger wrote an insightful 90th anniversary appreciation of "It Happened One Night," which swept the Academy Awards.

My mother, whom I always thought resembled Colbert, introduced me to the film, one of my all-time favorites.

Gable plays Peter, a wise-cracking newspaperman who ends up making a cross-country trip with Colbert's Ellie, a pampered heiress who escapes to Florida from the Northeast to avoid marrying a wealthy scion chosen by her father. Her escape draws national media attention, especially from tabloid newspapers.

Fired from his newspaper job after defying his editor, Peter tracks down Ellie so that he can write and sell a magazine article about her. She decides to return home to carry out her father's wishes, and they travel together, slowly falling in love.

Wearing stylish suits and a hip fedora, Gable portrays Peter as a cocky American tough guy with an underlying soft heart. Spoiled and sheltered since childhood, Ellie exhibits a flirty, teasing personality and discovers an inner resolve as they deal with obstacles on the road and she falls for Peter.

Capra created some of the most memorable moments in American cinema, including Gable and Colbert's celebrated hitch-hiking scene. After Peter fails in his worldly wise efforts to secure a ride, Ellie persuades a driver to stop by pulling her skirt above her thigh.  Her unexpected seductive gesture still gives an erotic charge.

In another classic scene, Colbert and Gable join passengers riding on a cross-country bus in a sing-along of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze." Reflecting American resolve and camaraderie during the Depression, the scene always amazes me when I see it on"YouTube."

The black and white classic gives Capra's vision of American communal spirit overcoming class differences and economic despair.

Gable and Colbert's wit and beauty still sparkle 90 years later.

 

 

February now heralds spring's arrival

A single crocus, or daffodil, has appeared in our front yard.

For years, dreary winter days made February seem to last forever, despite the month's brevity.

With the arrival of climate change, the transition to spring comes early.

We've experienced mostly mild and sunny days, with brief spells of cold and rain. Birds sing their love songs, and walkers fill the streets.

The changing climate no doubt will bring extreme weather in the future. For now, we're intoxicated by blue skies and sunshine.

 

 

 

Bill Evans documentary a chronicle of lost time

The documentary "Bill Evans, Time Remembered," held special meaning for me.

Producer Bruce Spiegel's compelling 90-minute biography of the acclaimed jazz pianist brought back memories of Baton Rouge.

Growing up in Louisiana's capital, I knew Evans' brother, Harry, and his family. Bill and Harry are buried together in Baton Rouge's Roselawn Cemetery.

The brothers studied music at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La., after abused childhoods in New Jersey.

While Bill moved to New York City for a career as one of the most eminent jazz composers and performers from the 1950s through the 1970s, Harry ran the music program for the Baton Rouge schools.

Harry's wife, Pat, who later became Louisiana's leading advocate for women's rights and a successful manager of political campaigns, began her career hosting a pioneering children's program on my father's TV station.

Also a fine pianist and composer, Harry gave Baton Rouge a glimpse of urban sophistication, performing with his quartet in nightclubs and on TV.  His wonderful performances are available on YouTube.

When I first discovered Bill Evans' music, I didn't know that he was Harry's brother, or that I was a high school classmate of his niece, the inspiration for his classic "Waltz for Debby."

Bill Evans, rivaling Duke Ellington, composed ethereal music that transcends jazz. He made a significant contribution to Miles Davis' monumental "Kind of Blue" and recorded a number of classic albums, such as "Sunday at the Village Vanguard."

As "Time Remembered" sadly outlines, Evans created his music while enmeshed in an incurable heroin addiction. Over the years, he suffered homelessness and was unable to perform because of the disease.

According to the film, he often shot up before taking the stage with his quartet. Pictures of Evans hunched over his piano capture the severe pain that accompanied his music.

Harry Evans also battled demons. Suffering from schizophrenia, he took his own life.

Before leaving Baton Rouge, I saw Harry one night in the Capitol House Hotel bar downtown. I'll always be haunted by the sadness of his eyes.

 

 

Calvin Trillin recalls lifelong love affair with journalism in "The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press"

Calvin Trillin is famed as a humorist, food writer and memoir writer.

Trillin's dazzling collection "The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press" displays that he's also one of our best writers on American journalism.

Ranging from profiles, essays and humorous "casuals" from the New Yorker to examples of his satirical political poetry for the Nation magazine, "The Lede" gives a multi-sided portrait of the history of American journalism during Trillin's more than 60-year career.

In eulogies for once famous journalists Russell Baker, Molly Ivins, John Gregory Dunne, Morley Safer, Murray Kempton and others, Trillin shows why he's often chosen to speak at funerals.

Trillin gives warm, affectionate portraits of his subjects, describing their personal characteristics and foibles with a light touch.

In his famous New Yorker profiles of the relentless Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan and flamboyant New York Times reporter R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr., Trillin recalls a vanished era of print newspaper dominance.

Buchanan, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Herald before leaving to write mystery novels, is presented as a model of old-style shoe-leather reporting. Trillin's profile gave Buchanan national prominence, as she was revered at newsrooms across the country. 

Apple, who died in 2006, was nationally known for his gargantuan appetite, outrageous personality and brilliant writing on subjects from food, wine and travel to international politics.

At first receiving notoriety from Timothy Crouse's portrait of him in "The Boys on the Bus," Apple was a familiar presence on The Times' front page for years.

As Trillin notes, Apple had a flair for quickly writing "Q-heads," analytical pieces on politics, the economy and international affairs. In one of his last pieces of the type, Apple predicted that George W. Bush's Iraq War would turn into a quagmire. After drawing intense criticism for this view based on the Vietnam War, Apple was proven correct.

Trillin, who began his career reporting on the civil rights movement for Time magazine, closes the book with a classic of American journalism, "Back on the Bus," which looks back at his experience traveling across the South from the fall of 1960 through the fall of 1961.

Violent white lawmen, courageous civil rights workers and valiant reporters like The New York Times' Claude Sitton come alive in the piece. The centerpiece is Trillin's recollection of traveling with freedom riders on a bus from Alabama to Jackson, Miss.

Trillin reveals himself as one of the era's bravest reporters.

 

Metro Atlanta needs economic transformation to handle huge population increase

The 21-country Atlanta metropolitan region will add 1.8 million new residents and 856,000 jobs by 2050, according to a recent estimate by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

That will give the sprawling area a population of 7.9 million, with most of the expansion from minority groups. The percentage of Latinos will increase from 12 to 21 percent.

The report shows that most of the population growth will come in outlying Forsyth, Barrow and Paulding counties, which unfortunately indicates that the region will remain mired in long-distance automobile commutes by individual drivers.

In issuing the report, ARC approved $169 billion in federal, state and local money for transportation projects through 2050, including an insufficient expansion of mass transportation. Most of the money will go to road construction and maintenance to serve commuting by automobiles.

A few warning signs cast doubt on the ARC's projections.

The region's water supply appears insufficient for that many new residents. Health care inequities and affordable housing shortages will worsen.

Unless electric cars replace those powered by gasoline, fossil-fuel emissions will keep rising to unsustainable levels. 

Extreme weather and other harmful effects of climate change will increase, unless the economy shifts to alternative sources of energy like solar power.

The optimistic future the ARC envisions depends on a transformation to a green economy.

 

 

AJC columnist Bill Torpy casts doubt on World Cup boost for downtown Atlanta

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Bill Torpy expressed skepticism Thursday that the World Cup will revitalize downtown Atlanta.

Torpy reported that on a walking tour of downtown, he found sparse lunchtime crowds at formerly packed CNN Center and nearly deserted streets elsewhere.

Once a popular tourist attraction and the busy headquarters of CNN and other media companies, CNN Center declined after the cable news network abandoned its longtime downtown home.

CNN Center's surviving bars and fast-food restaurants receive evening transfusions from Hawks games and concerts at State Farm Arena, but no longer draw steady daytime traffic.

As Torpy pointed out, downtown needs long-term development rather than the temporary boost of eight World Cup games.

While work has begun on the ambitious Centennial Yards project to transform the railroad gulch slashing across downtown, projects have stalled to renovate Underground Atlanta and restore a row of historic commercial buildings south of the Central Business District.

A project to upgrade the Five Points MARTA Station remains snarled in bureaucratic wrangling. Torpy reported that he found the MARTA station's desolate plaza nearly empty.

Downtown has never recovered from the Covid epidemic, registering the city's highest office vacancy rate. Developers are now converting nearly empty office buildings into residential apartments and condominiums. That will boost downtown's permanent residential population, the most important element of a downtown renaissance.

Torpy's own newspaper abandoned downtown in 2009, a huge commercial blow. Now the revitalized multi-media AJC will move back into the city, shunning downtown for offices in Midtown.

Other parts of the city are surging ahead and bringing back workers. Mailchimp recently opened a dazzling new office building on the Beltline. Workers crowd the streets in Midtown and Buckhead.

Downtown needs long-term commitments, not the brief shot from the World Cup.

 

Remembering Ash Wednesday

The small newspaper photograph shows my wife and our then infant daughter on Ash Wednesday.

Taken 40 years ago by the AJC's Nick Arroyo at Sacred Heart in downtown Atlanta, the photo ran in The Atlanta Journal, where I worked. Clipped from the newspaper, the small, intimate picture sits in a gold frame on a table in our living room.

My wife, who's already received her ashes, holds our month-old daughter as the priest with his thumb traces a cross upon her forehead.

For years on Ash Wednesday, I walked at lunch hour to Sacred Heart from the AJC building at 72 Marietta Street to receive my ashes, and hear the priest intone, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Walking outside after Mass, I felt part of something bigger. Lunchtime crowds swirled down Peachtree, and the Broad Street restaurants were packed. Lent had begun, but another spring would arrive soon, and the promise of Easter. So the years passed away.